The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  * Through Adeline Moses Loeb, her grandchildren today can trace remote cousinships to such people as Mrs. Randolph Churchill, Mrs. William A. M. Burden, Jr, and the Duchess of Norfolk.

  * The substitutes were culled from Loeb’s “B-List” of friends. One woman says, “I’d been going to lovely dinners at the Loebs’ for years before I discovered that I was one of his guinea pigs—that if I was asked for a Wednesday, the real party would be Thursday.”

  48

  “FAMILIENGEFÜHL” … AND NO BARE FEET AT DINNER

  After Jacob Schiff’s death, Therese Loeb Schiff began to blossom. Under the dominance of her husband, she had always seemed a meek little thing whose most effective form of protest was to burst into tears. Now she began to assert herself. She seemed, of all things, to have a personality. She became, as her husband had been, a person to be reckoned with.

  She announced, for one thing, that she had no intention of leaving the big Fifth Avenue house, as her family suggested, and moving to an apartment or, as several widows in the crowd had done, to the Plaza. She would continue to live in the style Jacob Schiff had set, tended to by Joseph, her major-domo. She continued her Tuesdays “at home.” She developed projects for herself. One was her practice of giving each grandson—there were five—a raccoon coat when he entered college. Morti’s son, John Schiff, and Frieda’s son, Paul Warburg, reached college age at the same time. John was accepted at Yale, but Paul failed his exams. John got his coat, but Paul did not. John’s coat was stolen in the middle of his freshman year, whereupon Therese bought him another. This outraged Paul; John had had two coats, and he had had none. Therese was adamant, but Paul took his case to Joseph, who, the boys knew, was one of the few people who had any influence over Mrs. Schiff. He got his coat.

  Young Paul Warburg was a great deal like his father, Felix—a prankster, a playboy, a charmer. At the age of twelve he was asked, “What did you do today?” and he airily replied, “I had lunch at Mr. and Mrs. Henry Morgenthau’s. Mrs. Morgenthau thinks I’m very well read. We discussed Wells’s Outline of History and Strachey’s Queen Victoria.” He had read neither book. He never did go to college. On a summer trip to Paris, after an all-night outing with Jack Straus and two young ladies, Paul wandered back to the Ritz at dawn and, somehow, got into the wrong room. Seeing “something large” on the bed, he flung his black ebony cane at it. It was his mother, who sat up in bed and said with perfect poise, “Your father will speak to you about this in the morning.”

  There had been few divorces in the crowd until Paul’s generation. He divorced his first two wives. His brother Gerald divorced his first wife. His cousin Jimmy Warburg divorced his first two wives. His cousin Renata divorced her first husband, and his brother Edward married a divorcee. For a while, Paul Warburg worked in the bond department of the International Acceptance Bank. One of his jokes was to say, as he entered the office each day, “Good morning, Mr. Carlton,” to the clerk who adjusted the Western Union ticker tape. (The joke was that Newcomb Carlton was chairman of the board of Western Union.) Once a visiting partner from M. M. Warburg in Germany found the ticker out of order and, remembering Paul’s greeting, picked up the phone and demanded to speak to Mr. Carlton. He was put through to Newcomb Carlton and said, “Get your tools and get right over here. Our ticker’s broken.” Carlton telephoned the bank’s president to say, “There are a lot of things I’ll do for your bank, but I won’t come over and fix your ticker.” Shortly thereafter, Paul Warburg took an office at Carl M. Loeb, Rhoades and, as the family puts it, “began to settle down.”

  Paul’s nickname was “Piggy,” and his brother Edward’s was “Peep” or “Peeper.” This was because his old German nurse had said he was like a little Piepmatz, or peeping sparrow. (For a while, his brothers called him “Matz,” but Grandmother Schiff objected.) Edward was interested in art, and wanted to teach. He approached Georgianna Goddard King, head of the art department at Bryn Mawr, who said she would like to hire him but had no budget for another instructor. Edward offered to work without pay, but Miss King said no one was permitted to do so. “But if I were to receive a check from some anonymous donor for a thousand dollars, that could go for your salary.” Edward Warburg said, “Shall I write the check now?” Miss King replied, “There’s no hurry.” Edward’s course was a great success, and soon Edward was able to approach Miss King and ask, “Don’t you think I should give myself a raise?” Later, Edward Warburg helped organize the film library at the Museum of Modern Art and, with Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine, launched the School of American Ballet.

  On Edward’s twenty-first birthday Felix Warburg had written to his son:

  For men like you who have to describe—and want to teach—the impressions which works of beauty make or ought to make on people at large, it is unavoidable to ask yourself “How does that strike me?” But otherwise I have found too much feeling of one’s pulse a weakening process, and I would rather watch others’ reactions and try to be helpful than self-indulgent or, what is the worst quality, self-pitying. Avoid that always—but pity others with all the noblesse oblige that station requires … remain a gentleman … and you will make people happy by your company, your sympathy, your understanding. The world is full of beauty and some kindly people—find them and be as happy and as lucky as has been so far your

  Old devoted Father

  He was an unusual father in that he encouraged each of his sons’ enthusiasms, and did not insist that any of them go into banking. Gerald became a cellist of some note, and later formed the Stradivarius Quartet, named for the four instruments his father had collected. Only Frederick became a fourth-generation Kuhn, Loeb partner. But of course Felix himself had begun to say, a little sadly, “I was never born to be a banker. I’ve buried nine partners, and now end up as the sole survivor of this big firm, with nothing but young people around me.”

  In summer all the scattered Warburgs liked to gather at Woodlands in White Plains, where both Felix and Paul had houses, and where the children had been given parcels of property and, in some cases, houses of their own. Felix bought two hundred acres adjacent to Woodlands which he called Meadow Farm, and this became Therese Loeb Schiff’s summer home. Even though it belonged to the Warburgs, Meadow Farm was always called “Mrs. Schiff’s house,” and she grew quite possessive about it. No one, she announced, was to use her bedroom while she was away—except, she added, “Felix may use it if he wishes.” Even long after Therese’s death in 1933 at the age of eighty—on her last Tuesday “at home”—Meadow Farm was still “Mrs. Schiff’s house,” and the couple who cared for it would allow no changes, always saying, “Mrs. Schiff liked it this way.”

  The house at Meadow Farm was considerably more modest than the huge old place at Woodlands, and, after Felix Warburg’s death in 1937, Frieda moved to Meadow Farm for her summers. Here she worked on dispersing items from her husband’s estate—the art collection to museums in Washington, Boston, Springfield, Brooklyn, and New York, as well as to Harvard, Vassar, Princeton, New York University, and the David Mannes School of Music. She also busied herself with the Felix and Frieda Schiff Warburg Foundation, which aids a number of Jewish causes as well as the Visiting Nurse Service, the Central Institute for the Deaf in St. Louis, New York University, the Planned Parenthood Federation, the National Urban League, Tuskegee Institute, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Lewisohn Stadium Concerts and—hard though it may be to believe—a long list of other charities.

  After Felix’s death, Frieda herself established a separate foundation for settling immigrants in Israel. By 1955 it had built over a thousand homes. In winter Frieda traveled to her house on Eden Road at Palm Beach, where in her twilight years her afternoons were filled with bridge and canasta and visits with old friends. Adele Lewisohn Lehman had a place nearby, and so did the Henry Ittlesons, the Sol Stroocks, and Edithe Neustadt Stralem, whose sister had married Frieda’s brother Morti. In all three places—New York, Palm Beach, and Westches
ter—there were plenty of family around. Still, whenever she had a free moment, Frieda dictated her reminiscences into a recording gadget, as her family had urged her to. “They say I am a link with the past,” she said.

  She wrote: “To me, and to all our family, it has always been of the utmost importance to know one’s past and to live up to it with pride and a true sense of responsibility.” Her memoirs gently took to task certain members of the family—her brother Morti’s branch—who, she felt, did not always “live up to” the past. Of Morti Schiff himself she wrote: “I loved him dearly, even though I might criticize his ‘society’ kind of life, which I knew was a sort of escape for him.”

  Of Morti’s daughter, the four-times married Dorothy Schiff, publisher of the New York Post, Frieda said: “Many of her ventures, matrimonial and otherwise, have left some time-gaps when it was not easy for us to maintain contact. To me, she is disarmingly amusing and charming, even if her enthusiasms at times seem to carry her beyond her depth.… I am always tremendously amused by her giggly anecdotes and her youthful exuberances concerning the passing scene.” Of Morti’s son, the polo-playing Kuhn, Loeb partner, John Schiff, who married the George F. Baker, Jr.’s’ daughter Edith and who went sailing into the Social Register, the Piping Rock Club, the Turf and Field, the Creek, the Grolier, the River, the National Golf Links, the Meadow Brook, the Pilgrims, and the Metropolitan Club of Washington, his aunt commented: “Like his father he has a way of making abrupt, short, assertive statements which sound brusque until the shy grin that follows gives him away. He was brought up in the tradition of the Long Island gentleman, which sometimes comes into amusing conflict with his underlying German-Jewish inheritance.”

  Outside the winter house on Eden Road, there nested a pair of cardinals—wintering also—whom Frieda named “Spellman” and “Mrs. Spellman.” Frieda wrote:

  I like to think that the birds, like myself, have not only derived warmth from the sun but from the surroundings in which we have found ourselves. It is pleasant to realize that these good things have been and will be a part of my life always.… There have been times when I yearned for the ability to lose myself in deep religious faith, and, although I have observed many of these forms, I must admit that the most meaningful experience to me has been the sense of family (Familiengefühl), which has grown and flourished in our household.

  Familiengefühl had become the crowd’s most powerful religion. It was why family holidays and anniversaries had become far more important than the Sabbath or the Jewish holy days. For the Seligmans, at one point, there were 243 days out of every calendar year that marked a family anniversary of some sort, and nearly every one of these was given some sort of observance. Lives revolved around family days. Had not young Felix and Frieda Warburg chosen a family birthday—Frederick’s—to move into their new house at 1109 Fifth Avenue? It was Familiengefühl that warmed Margaret Seligman Lewisohn’s debut party, held at the Warburgs’ house. Congreve, the Warburgs’ steward-butler, had, as his somewhat unusual hobby, been raising chickens from an incubator in the Warburg basement. It was probably the only chicken hatchery on upper Fifth Avenue, and no one in the family was entirely sure whether it was a good idea. But when Congreve incorporated his project into the family debut, everyone forgave him. He designed a centerpiece for the party consisting of three-day-old baby chicks “coming out” of a brooder, with a low white picket fence all around it. The chicks chirped all through the party.

  Since the family was still the business, a little Geschäftsgefühl mixed with the Familiengefühl was not inappropriate. And, on the eve of his daughter’s marriage, Felix Warburg could write to his son Gerald to say:

  Carola’s wedding presents are coming in, and as she reports to me, business is good. Do not get too fat, because the house will be crowded on the 27th, for with 280 people who insist on seeing Carola married, and about 900 who will come afterward to shake her poor hand off, there will not be any rugs left in the house, and anything that is eatable, drinkable or smokable will disappear very fast Dr. Magnes will officiate and I am quite sure he will say the right thing at the right time.

  For Jacob Schiff’s sixtieth birthday, a huge family party had been held at 1109. A stage and screen were erected in the second-floor music room, and at the height of the evening the lights dimmed and Gerald Warburg, dressed as Mercury, appeared from behind a curtain and pointed dramatically to an enormous photograph of the Rock of Gibraltar that appeared on the screen. The lights dimmed once more and, with a thunderous roll of drums from offstage, a photograph of the twenty-two-story Kuhn, Loeb building was superimposed upon the Rock.

  But perhaps the gathering with the most Familiengefühl of all was Frieda Schiff Warburg’s own sixtieth-birthday party, planned as a surprise for her by the children and grandchildren. Her sons Frederick and Edward devised a skit which showed that religion was the family. It was their version of the Seder ceremony, reinterpreting the Exodus from Egypt. But Egypt, in the Warburg version, was southern Germany, and the Lost Tribes of Israel—Solomon Loeb and his brothers—were given a Baedeker but managed to get themselves even more lost; instead of turning right at the Nile, they turned left and found themselves in Cincinnati. There, Frederick declared, the family’s business was “buying feathers from the Indians and selling them at football games.” Next, Edward gave an illustrated lecture on Frieda’s life, using slides of various works of art to represent its various phases: a hectic cubist painting to show her frame of mind after her morning telephone calls; a plump Lachaise sculpture to show her girth before visiting Elizabeth Arden’s Maine Chance Farm, and a Pavlova figure by Malvina Hoffman to show the “new” Frieda Schiff, after Arden. As a finale, her sons delivered a poem they had written for the occasion. It asked a long series of questions about who did what in the Warburg family, and the chanted answer, at the end of each stanza, was: “The boys, the boys.”

  Frieda and Felix Warburg’s only daughter, Carola, has a summer home in Katonah, in upper Westchester, a large, rambling old place at the end of a long, shaded lane, and the house stands on a little rise under huge old trees, surrounded by rolling lawns, a garden, and a tennis court. Carola Warburg is the widow of Walter N. Rothschild—of “the Brooklyn branch,” as he used to say, of the European House of Rothschild—head of the Abraham & Straus department store, and a well-known yachtsman who, among other benefactions, presented his fifty-five-foot yawl, the Avanti, to the United States Naval Academy and once gave an elephant to the Prospect Park Zoo. Mrs. Rothschild is a tall, handsome, silver-haired woman who nearly always wears blue—“It’s the only color I seem to see”—and whose main charitable interests are hospitals and the American Girl Scouts, of which she was national vice president. She is on the boards of Montefiore Hospital, of the Brearley School, of the Ellin Prince Speyer Animal Medical Center—Mrs. Rothschild lives surrounded by dogs—of the Maternity Center, and is active in the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. When asked, however, if she is a practicing Jew, she answers, “Well, I was married by a rabbi,” and one gathers that this is one of the few concessions she has made to her religious heritage. She is, of course, Jacob Schiff’s granddaughter, and the great-granddaughter of Solomon Loeb and Fanny Kuhn; her cousins, near and remote, are named Lewisohn and Seligman; in her dining room, amidst some of her own paintings, many of which are of fruit—“I had a fruit period”—hangs the Anders Zorn portrait of Frieda Schiff Warburg, painted in the pink dress she wore the night she first met Felix. One might expect Carola Warburg Rothschild to encapsulate all the values of her forebears. In many ways, she does.

  Of her father, she says, “Fizzie taught them all how to do it. They all learned from him. The Schiffs were never strong on humor. The Warburgs were. We had a certain graciousness of living, and a sense of noblesse oblige. That’s what we had—and discipline. We had discipline.”

  As her mother and grandmother did before her, Mrs. Rothschild spends much of her Katonah summers surrounded by small grandchildren—she has thirt
een—who have such names as Peters and Bradford (her three children all married non-Jews). Meals in her dining room are nowhere near as formal as they were in her grandfather’s day, but, of course, they are still served by a white-coated butler, and one day one of the children sat down at the dinner table in his bare feet. “I looked at him,” says Mrs. Rothschild, “and I said, ‘No bare feet at the dinner table.’ He said to me, “Is that a rule, Grandma?’ and I said, ‘Well, I hadn’t really thought about it. But yes. It’s a rule.’ He said, ‘Okay, if it’s a rule.’ It’s that simple. If you tell a child it’s a rule, he obeys it. It’s discipline again. That’s what’s been omitted from so many of these young people’s lives—discipline. You can’t give a horse its head without using the rein. You have to rein to be under control. You have to accept rules and limitations in order to cope with things. If you have discipline, then you can always rise to occasions.”

  Index

  A. T. Stewart & Co., 158, 159, 162, 164

  Abraham & Straus, 20, 420

  Abraham family, 20

  Adams, Henry, 124

  Adams, James Truslow, 99

  Adirondacks camps, 18, 23, 231

  Adler, Cyrus, 180, 192

  Adler, Felix, 132, 141, 166

  Aldrich, Nelson, 383

  Aldrich, Bill, 342n.

  Alexander, James W., 326–27

  Alexander family, 326–27

  Alfonso XIII of Spain, 351

  Alger, Horatio, 150–51

  Alsterufer Warburgs, 211

  Altschul, Mrs. Frank, 16–17

  Altschul family, 20, 361

  Amalgamated Copper Co., 292

  American Hebrew, 318, 321